The present invention relates to driver circuits for power transistors and, more particularly, to a gate driver circuit employing current sensing, current limiting and current overprotection. The invention further relates to methods for power transistor protection in the event of an overcurrent. The present invention is particularly applicable to MOSFET and IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) power transistors.
The provision of practical and economical current sensing circuitry in MOSFET and IGBT driver circuits for automatically protecting the power transistors from excessive overcurrents has long been sought by driver circuitry circuit designers and, in particular, in the high side of high side--low side MOSFET and IGBT power circuits.